Review of Paul Lynch’s After Pedagogy: The Experience of Teaching

In
After Pedagogy: The Experience of Teaching, Paul Lynch takes
on the disciplinary skepticism that dominates discussions of
postpedagogy and postprocess. The project he sets for himself is
daunting for a couple of reasons. First, the scholars and arguments
that he addresses are complicated and persuasive. Moreover, the label
of post-anything has become somewhat vacuous, because it signifies
both the end of something and everything that comes afterward, so
that attempting to articulate a response seems futile. In his
discussion of the After of his title, he admits that it is
“ridiculous to talk about being ‘postpostpedagogical’” (7).
Nevertheless, despite these challenges, his project is accessible and
hopeful, without being the least bit simplistic or naïve.

Lynch
describes the current impasse between composition studies’
pedagogical mission and the view that pedagogy isn’t viable in a
postprocess era. The common critique of the process approach, that it
devolved into a set of one-size-fits-all instructions ignoring the
contingencies of rhetorical practice, has induced the belief that all
pedagogies must inevitably fall into the same trap. To advance or
adopt a single pedagogy is to deny the very nature of writing and
teaching as context-specific, and yet to thoroughly embrace the
contingent nature of writing and teaching means proceeding with no
plan, no predetermined set of principles. A field that so earnestly
self-identifies with teaching is confronted with the conviction that
teaching may be impossible.

In
order to move beyond this impasse, Lynch draws on a wide array of
resources, including casuistry, the ancient and often-maligned method
of case-based reasoning; John Dewey’s complex arguments about
experience; and philosopher Charles Taylor’s notion of “inspired
adhoccery.” These resources allow him to reframe pedagogy as what
happens after we teach, rather than as what we do before we
walk into the classroom. We typically understand pedagogy as taking
theoretical principles and applying them to the classroom (hence the
inevitable question at the conference presentation: “this theory is
all well and good, but what should I do in the classroom on Monday
morning?”). Lynch argues that pedagogy is more productively
understood as a reflection on the experiences of the classroom, in
the context of previous classroom experiences and in light of the
principles and theories that have arisen from those experiences.
Instead of the Monday morning question, Lynch says, we should be
asking the Tuesday morning question. Pedagogy thus can also account
for the surprising moments and student writing that don’t quite fit
with what we thought we knew.

Chapters
One and Two of After Pedagogy describe the field’s loss of
confidence in pedagogy. While our current stage of
skepticism—identified as postprocess, postpedagogy, or most
ominously, postcomposition—is relatively recent, Lynch reminds us
that even Quintillian harbored doubts about the teaching enterprise,
because, in Quintillian’s words, “most rules are liable to be
altered by the nature of the case” (qtd. in Lynch 2). To dismiss
theoretical principles’ applicability to individual classrooms or
writing situations, however, results in the rambling, unsteady House
of Lore, built entirely by practitioners. The paradox of Lore is that
as soon as an instructor borrows from another’s Lore, the very
thing that made that particular practice effective, the situatedness
of the original event, is gone; we are in the realm of the abstract.
And yet, to thoroughly embrace the uncertainty and the specificity of
writing and teaching, he argues, could easily “regress to a
despairing adhocism” (21). Lynch’s response to this despair in
Chapter One is Taylor’s “inspired adhoccery,” which means, in
Stanley Fish’s words, “regarding each situation-of-crisis as an
opportunity for improvisation and not as an occasion for the
application of rules and principles” (qtd. in Lynch 23).

Chapter
Two surveys the scholarship identified with postprocess and
postpedagogy, a survey that is thorough, respectful, and touched with
brief moments of humor that reflect Lynch’s accessible, hopeful
style. Lynch explains that postpedagogy, aligned with the third
sophistic school, emerged from postprocess theory. To review
postprocess, he focuses on Thomas Kent’s work, which draws on
Jean-Francois Lyotard’s understanding of paralogy. In Kent’s
work, paralogy is about what happens every time we use language and
“the unpredictable, elusive, and tenuous decisions or strategies we
employ” (qtd. in Lynch 33). It is this contingency that is lost in
process pedagogy, which codifies language use. Postprocess, then, is
not just a reaction to a previous disciplinary paradigm, although it
is that, but also an assertion about the fundamental nature of
writing. The implications of this assertion for teaching and for the
discipline itself can be far-reaching. For Kent, the implication is
that writing cannot be taught. He and others argue that this entails
a dramatic shift in how we, as a field, understand our purpose and
purview. For example, Amy E. Robillard characterizes the implication
as a “shifting disciplinary focus from writing as verb— as
represented most clearly by the pedagogical imperative—to writing
as noun— and
object of study in its own right” (254).

Lynch
follows his discussion of postprocess theory with a discussion of the
third sophistic school. These two bodies of scholarship are very much
related, and in fact overlap in places, but because they do provide
slightly different perspectives on the issues at hand, Lynch treats
them separately. The third sophistic school understands that
fundamental nature of writing through the notion of paralogic
invention, which produces “utterances not yet made or even
imagined” (38). These unimagined utterances are manifested in
Victor Vitanza’s “illegitimate couplings”; Diane Davis’s
disruptive laughter and the “excess” and “overflow” on the
student’s page; and Thomas Rickerts’s jouissance. These
are not phenomena that one can plan or orchestrate—that is the
point. Therefore, to value or applaud the unexpected and
uncontainable in student writing does not necessarily indicate a role
for the one applauding. Or, in Lynch’s words, “this rhetoric of
comedy leaves us with a question: should teachers be in on the joke
or play the straight man?” (45). How does one create a pedagogy
that aims to foster resistance to itself (a dilemma for critical
pedagogues as well as postpedagogues)?

Lynch’s
project is to fill in this gap in the postprocess and postpedagogy
scholarship. While some scholars (Kent, Vitanza, and Sidney Dobrin,
for example) argue that this is the occasion for composition studies
to move beyond teaching as its focus, Lynch rightly acknowledges that
a significant percentage of our work responsibilities remain in the
classroom. To this end, in Chapter Three, Lynch briefly works with
the concept of techne, recovering it through the scholarship
of Janet Atwill, by highlighting the role of contingency in her
understanding of techne. For Lynch, “if pedagogy is a
techne, experience is simultaneously its occasion and its
material” (64). By experience, he specifically means John Dewey’s
arguments about experience, which comprise the heart of Lynch’s
project. Chapter Three is devoted to an extensive review of Dewey’s
work more generally and his several arguments about experience.

Lynch
exploits the fact that experience as a concept, especially in
Dewey’s work, is multilayered and flexible. Experience can be
primary, as data we collect moving through the world, and secondary,
as the sense we make of that data, which we take forward into new
experiences. Lynch says, “experience is the vehicle by which we
carry learning from the present into the future” (86). Primary
experience includes the contingent, and the surprising, disruptive
laughter described by the third sophistic scholars. In Lynch’s
view, cultivating these contingencies of the primary experience,
using them as a resource, and moving forward is the ultimate
challenge for pedagogy.

To
address this challenge, Lynch argues for casuistry, to which he turns
in Chapter Four. Typically used in moral and legal reasoning,
casuistry is a method for dealing with a situation in which the
general principles do not work, or when two principles conflict.
According to Lynch, “[c]asuistry is for the student whom the law
does not serve, the student whose work—at least at that particular
moment—seems to make us choose between being attentive to her
specific needs on the one hand and supporting the curriculum we have
designed on the other” (115). The thoughtful attention to the
specific case at hand, fostered by casuistry, allows the teacher to
“intellectualize the uncertainty of teaching” (137). We
understand each specific case through the lens of previous
experiences. Scholarship about pedagogy would go beyond the accretion
of experiences characteristic of the rambling House of Lore, but
would instead begin with a particular classroom experience and put it
up against previous experiences in what Lynch refers to as
“[t]axonomic articulation” (134). Ultimately Lynch argues that
instead of Lore, practitioners adopt experience as their
keyword (128). He is only half-joking, I believe, when he argues that
in his vision of our postdiscipline, we would produce “elaborate
and immense volumes of pedagogical case studies” (134). The
inefficiency of this approach is its virtue; it simultaneously avoids
the one-size-fits-all trap characteristic of process pedagogy and, at
the same time, allows the teacher to approach new situations with a
breadth of relevant knowledge.

Lynch’s
very valuable contribution to the field is to provide a thoughtful
response to the question of how we teach writing. It is not
likely that casuistry or a very complex understanding of Dewey will
become mainstream ideas in composition studies, and Lynch himself
acknowledges that his concepts don’t lend themselves to easy
catchphrases (for example, he doesn’t anticipate House of
Pedagogical Casuistry to be quite as pervasive in our disciplinary
conversations as House of Lore has been [137].) In Beyond
Pedagogy: Theorizing Without Teachers, a recent article that takes
up many of the same issues that Lynch does, Amy D. Williams argues
for “composition experience scholarship” but does not cite Dewey
at all. Nevertheless, the field can definitely benefit from Lynch’s
understanding of pedagogy as what happens after we teach, how
we make useful sense of the experience of the contingencies of the
classroom and of writing.

While
much of the current scholarship about pedagogy is focused on
binaries—theory vs. practice, writing-as-noun vs.
writing-as-verb—it is worth considering the extent to which the how
and the what of teaching writing have long been conflated
in the field. This is perhaps most evident in the phrase, “teach
writing as process” (process in this phrase is both how and
what we teach). There is some of that conflation happening in
Lynch’s work. At times it is not clear if it is writing or teaching
that is context-dependent, contingent, and uncertain. In his
discussion of experience, he argues that pedagogy turns the
experience-as-data of the classroom into method for future classroom
situations, but he also explains that “[a] Deweyan teacher helps
students turn their experience-as-data into experience-as-method”
(95), suggesting that “experience” is both the how and the what
of teaching.

He
suggests that curriculum—what we might think of as the what
of teaching—is about designing the occasions for student writing
(93). What I believe the field needs right now, to complement or
extend Lynch’s work, is a more sustained inquiry into the what
of teaching. It is possible that the crisis that Lynch devotes his
book to describing and responding to has been elicited and shaped as
much by the drastic and rapid changes in the technologies surrounding
rhetorical practices, as it has by the codification of the process
approach. In other words, perhaps we are less certain about how we
teach because we don’t know what we are teaching. What
are we teaching, or what counts as writing in the era of digital,
multimodal writing? What are our curricular responsibilities
vis-à-vis image and layout, for example? What role does the writing
that our students do online and via social media play in our
understanding of what we teach? Answering these questions will
take the same type of nuanced, complex, and hopeful approach that
Lynch takes in After Pedagogy: The Experience of Teaching.